A meeting of the minds with a range of community organizers including Ron Gochez, Marcy Winograd, Bilal Ali, Michael Feinstein, Kim MaGill and others and organizers who are working to develop alternatives to the current corporate-dominated political system.

Brent Budowsky: President Obama blew it, but he can still lead Democrats to a landslide victory in 2012 by understanding the sources of the third great realignment in more than a century, which should have been realized after his election in 2008.

Joseph Palermo: Wall Street banks should be pouring money into Obama’s reelection since he’s been so good to them, and the neocons should be rejoicing in his establishing precedent for more unchecked executive power.

Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Romney has yet to launch a Spanish language version of his website and has only released two Spanish language TV ads. Moreover, while these ads are in Spanish they are not unique, meaning they are simply translations of English language ads.

Shamus Cooke: The banking oligarchy is so intertwined with the political and economic establishment that real regulatory change cannot happen until the system itself is transformed from below, by a powerful social movement. Pleading to politicians to fix so-called Casino Capitalism is increasingly naive.

Tina Dupuy: Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.

Steve Hochstadt: One of the facts of small town American life, which is often held up as the American ideal, is that nasty partisan politics are tempered by the bonds of friendship and the need to get along with your neighbors.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Margo McCall: There’s increasing evidence that adopting a plant-based diet is better for human health, the planet, and of course for the more than 9 billion animals that are killed for consumption each year in the U.S alone.